The Taurus

The Greek name of the range, Taûros, “the Bull,” the long chain that walls the Anatolian plateau off from the Mediterranean, crossed by the single narrow pass of the Cilician Gates. Whether the name is the Greek word for “bull,” for the massive look of the mountains, or an older Anatolian name reshaped to it, the Greeks heard it as the Bull and so it has stayed.

What makes the Taurus more than a regional range is the role classical geography gave it. Eratosthenes and Strabo took the Taûros and its eastward continuation as the master dividing line of all Asia, the great east-west spine that split the continent into a northern half and a southern; everything was located as “this side of the Taurus” or “beyond the Taurus.” A single Anatolian mountain wall thus became the reference axis of the ancient world-map, the line against which the whole of Asia was measured, the Bull made the backbone of a continent.

The Latin name of the range, Taurus, identical to the Greek and to the Latin word for “bull.” Pliny traces its course at length across the whole breadth of Asia, following the classical convention that made the Taurus the continent’s dividing spine, and lists the many local names its successive stretches bore as it ran eastward into the Caucasus and beyond.

The Latin preserved both the name and the grand geographical idea behind it, the Taurus as the axis of Asia, and passed them to the European tradition; the range keeps the name Taurus on the map to this day. It is a rare case of a mountain whose name needed no translation between Greek and Latin, the same word, the Bull, serving both, and whose chief distinction is not a myth or an empire but the work it did in the minds of the geographers, holding up, like its namesake animal, the whole weight of a continent’s map.